Saturday, January 11, 2014

Fragility and Alienation in Kantian Universality

When
we say that beauty is subjective, we mean something like this: a painting, a
landscape, a song, etc, is not in and of itself actually beautiful, but rather
that the beauty dimension is a sort of illusion in the mind of the viewer. Despite the
understanding we might have that beauty is not an inherent feature of an object
or experience in itself, but rather a subjective response we are compelled to
superimpose upon it, nevertheless, the beauty of a Beethoven string quartet
feels as inherent a characteristic as greenness is an inherent characteristic
of grass, or coldness of ice. That is, just as you can’t strip away the green
from the grass, beauty feels like it couldn’t be stripped from the music; it
just seems to be there. And just as we
don’t feel like the greenness of grass is a subjective matter that occurs somewhere between our eyes and visual cortexes, we don’t actually feel like the beauty of music
is actually only subjective, or imaginary, or a matter of choice.

As
a result of this state, where beauty is experienced as a virtual reality
dimension of a thing, we tend to expect that others will agree that the beauty is
there, in the same way we expect others to agree that a blade of grass is, in
reality, green. In other words, we commonly say that art and beauty are purely
subjective, but when you are really
gripped by a piece of art or music and feel that intense sensation of beauty,
where your hair stands on end and tears are brought to your eyes, it doesn't
feel subjective, but rather feels quite objective and "real."

What
results from this is a social component of beauty, which has two basic sides:
one, a potential embarrassment, and the other, a sort of pride. These manifest
what I observe as two different types of behavior in turn. I will account for
the latter first.

Why
do we like to post songs on Facebook? Why do we use Pinterest or Tumblr? And
why is "liking" or "faving" a part of this experience?
There are many ways to explain this phenomena to be sure, but an explanation
from the vantage point of this entry is that we want to share things we find
beautiful, and when we do this, we want others to feel the same way. Beauty
allows us to virtually externalize our subjective states in a way that isn't
otherwise easy, if even possible. A piece of beautiful art is able to
crystallize something you feel but could never really articulate and, in turn,
to present it in simple, sensate form. Beauty utters the ineffable (which
presumably undergrids everything, if you will indulge me some portentiousness.)
To find that someone else connects to the object in question and
"likes" or "favs" it is to feel, through proxy perhaps, a
connection beyond the object. Your
own subjective response feels all the more real by virtue of the agreement of
others. And thus we want to share the things we find aesthetically right, if not beautiful. This aspect of aesthetic
experience allows us to form communities (this is a term I tend to associate
with Dave Hickey in regards to aesthetics) around things we agree are
beautiful. It is the mechanism of stylistically-oriented subculture. It is the
reason bands are able to sell t-shirts. It isn’t trivial and I don’t think it
is even really secondary.

On
the other hand, and what is more interesting to me, a fragility embedded in the
experience of beauty becomes apparent when disagreement occurs.

If
I am lecturing to a class on aesthetics and I share something I truly feel is
an example of beauty and the response of the class is something other than
their agreement, it is a painful experience. In turn, of course, is a feeling
of abject, awkward embarrassment to be in the audience that is being exposed to
a botched beauty attempt. Someone is reading a poem or playing an acoustic
guitar and it isn’t good and you don’t know what to do so you play with your iPhone
because what else can you do in such a crisis?

Along
similar lines is the potential debasement of the aesthetic dimension of
something when it enters the larger public sphere. It would not be uncommon nor
would it be wrong to feel a kind of betrayal when a song you have loved is used
in an advertisement. Beauty does not really occur in a vacuum, despite the
“white cube” rhetoric of modern gallery spaces. The power of soundtracks should
go without saying. An image can be altered and manipulated in myriad ways
merely by the accompaniment of music; it is as effective as it is subtle. If
beautification through association is possible, why wouldn’t the opposite be as
well?

A
song by The Smiths called “Paint a Vulgar Picture” provides some insight into
the nature of debasement and fandom:

“I
walked a pace behind you at the soundcheck

You're
just the same as I am

What
makes most people feel happy

Leads
us headlong into harm”

The
key feature of the dynamic described in this song hinges around the distinction
between “most people” and “us.” This is not a description of an ostensibly universal appeal of the object of fandom
(described as “another dead star”), but rather very limited, personal
connection felt by the narrator. (As a sidenote, I think this is another song
Morrissey wrote about himself, which hopefully doesn’t complicate things too
much.)

Kant
describes the aspect of aesthetic judgment where we expect others to agree as
“universality,” though we might use a word like “universalizability.” That is
to say that for Kant, the community that a person expects will agree with an
aesthetic judgment has no bounds. The nature of aesthetic experience in Kant’s conception
of it is that anyone anywhere making an aesthetic judgment of beauty should
feel like anyone else anywhere else will agree with the validity of that
judgment. Or to use Kant’s word, you universalize your aesthetic judgments. Perhaps
this expectation is an ideological feature – an artifact that emerged somewhere
between the Symposium and the Critique of Judgment as a result of the
philosophical baggage the concept of “beauty” acquired along the way (IE associations
with “truth”, “goodness”, etc, all associated, in turn, with brute political or
moral imperatives.) Perhaps the expectation of universalizability is a sign
that our notion of beauty is corrupted.

In
any event, this is a feature of Kant’s critique I find worthwhile to question:
is it not typical of humans to identify their humanity at the level of
microcommunities rather than toward an abstact whole? Isn’t it possible that,
while a person might expect others to agree, this does not necessarily include all others – far from it, in fact? If
you are a Morrissey fan and the world seems cruel, insensitive, wrong, etc, why
should one expect the entire universe
to agree about beauty? After all: “the world won’t listen.”

I
might describe this limited scope of applicability as “aesthetic alienation.” That
is to say, I think that we do project the validity of our aesthetic judgments
onto other people, but we limit the extent of this projection.

Different
sources of beauty may entail different possibilities for social presentation.
Is it comprehensible to imagine Mark Kozelek playing in an arena? It would be
crass and absurd. While it is empirically possible that there are enough people
who like Mark Kozelek to fill an arena, if you experience the music in very
personal terms, mass appeal would be totally incongruous and aesthetically
debased. When “personal” is an aspect of the aesthetic character of something,
quality becomes bluntly inextricable with quantity: where art is “personal,”
the better it is, the less of an audience you will expect to “relate.”

On
the other hand, it goes without saying that ACDC will play in an arena and so
an arena is probably aesthetically integral to the experience – of COURSE other
people like ACDC, and of course there are enough to fill an arena in any given
city. (I choose the examples of Mark Kozelek and and ACDC because Mark Kozelek has released an album of Bon Scott-era ACDC covers which render the songs abjectly poingnant and personal.) In effect, this sort of economics of fandom seems to be built into styles
which have subcultural extensions; the discrete boundaries (and thus, the
sanctity) of the community must not be overreached by popular appeal to the
larger social sphere. This situation is grist for much “hipster” bashing, but I
think it is actually a simple and basic mechanism of how taste actually works;
the difference is that prior to the 00s, discrete styles were a possibility and
we had words for them and their subcultural extensions like “punk” or “disco”. Basically,
to account for this mechanism: we want our tastes to mean something
commensurable with how deeply we might feel moved by them. The way we measure
this meaning is a sort of balancing act between qualifying and quantifying factors
– how precisely do we relate to the other people who are relating to the art?